The Suleiman Problem: Egypt's Transitional Figure Won't Transition

"... Neither Suleiman's gestures nor his threats have had any impact on the protest movement  ... So the U.S. finds itself putting pressure on Suleiman to do things he's not comfortable doing — a fact noted on Wednesday by Egypt's Foreign Minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, who lashed out at the U.S. for "imposing its will". The conflict with Suleiman and those around him over the terms of change should come as no surprise to Administration officials, says Marc Lynch, a George Washington University specialist in Arab politics, whom the White House consulted as it sought to reshape its policy in response to the Egypt crisis. "The hard reality is that we may not get the cathartic moment of Mubarak's plane departing to the cheers of millions of Egyptians celebrating a new era," Lynch wrote on Tuesday in Foreign Policy. "The struggle is now shifting to the much messier terrain of negotiations over the terms of Egypt's transition ... Nobody in the administration has any illusions about Suleiman's likely intentions to revert to the old familiar games of the Egyptian national security state: dividing and co-opting the opposition, selective repression, stoking fears of Islamists, playing for time while evoking a desire for normalcy, offering token reforms which can either be retracted down the road or emptied of meaning, and protecting the core perogoatives of the regime. The Egyptian military seems to have a winning game plan, and it doesn't include the fundamental reforms for which Egyptian protestors or the Obama administration have called."...

 

Although those on the street have made Mubarak's departure the sine qua non of resolving the political crisis, the mechanics of achieving that under the current constitutional order are complicated — indeed, the opposition has not yet presented a consensus position on just how Mubarak should be eased out and a democratic election process be instituted....  Suleiman may be under pressure from the Obama Administration to open up political space to the regime's opponents, but he is as tough as he is wily, and he plainly has little use for Washington's tutelage in managing the crisis. Besides publicly questioning Egypt's readiness for democracy, he insists that the emergency will be lifted only when "conditions" allow it, a position the regime has maintained for years. So the question facing the Obama Administration is how much pressure it is willing to put behind its demands for reform and negotiation — or, even more urgently, for restraint. "